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A Dream Restored

Arthur Ashe visited Soweto in 1973. "His condemnation of apartheid made him one of us," a young tennis player later wrote.Credit
Alf Kumalo

SOWETO, South Africa — Unnoticed by the outside world, part of Arthur Ashe’s legacy — a tennis center for black South Africans — descended into decay and ruin long before his death in 1993.

Not long after its opening in 1976, vandals tore down fences and ransacked the clubhouse. Neighbors dumped garbage onto the grounds. The country was in turmoil over the violent repression of blacks by the minority white government. Soweto descended into lawlessness.

In March 1977, a month after their wedding, Ashe and Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe stood on the dilapidated site and surveyed the damage. Their dream of a tennis center at the core of Africa’s largest black township had turned into a nightmare of crime and disorder.

But today, still largely unseen by outsiders, the Arthur Ashe Tennis Center has been brought from the grave to the brink of revival. Behind its rebirth are two men: Ian Smith, a mild-mannered, conservatively dressed white sports executive; and Bongani Zondi, a bold, leather-jacket-clad black political activist who goes by the nickname Wire.

When it was built, the Ashe Center was intended to inspire black Africans to emulate a black American. Ashe’s victory at Wimbledon in 1975 was a catalyst.

But within months of a fanfare dedication of the center’s eight courts, South Africa headed into dark days of repression. On June 16, 1976, the Soweto student uprising began. Twenty-three students, according to official totals, were killed in a hail of gunfire while protesting a requirement that they be taught in Afrikaans, the language of the rulers.

In 1984, tennis-playing residents restored the courts, but vandals struck again and the property fell back into decay and disrepute.

Photo

In addition to resurfaced courts, the tennis center includes a library. Ashe's widow attended the official opening in March.Credit
John Martin

“It became a dumping ground, a place for dead dogs,” said Zondi, a Johannesburg city councilor who represents the Jabavu neighborhoods of Soweto, where he was born in 1959.

“It was a place of crime, a problem for the community,” Zondi said.

He added: “During those days, people didn’t care about facilities, they didn’t care if they were vandalized or not. We were intensifying our struggle to resist the government.”

For Zondi, the fight was personal. He went underground in the 1970s to recruit members for the banned African National Congress, which sought to end apartheid. “I was never arrested,” he said. “I always managed to run away, but it was very difficult.”

When the country staged a peaceful election and transition to majority rule in 1994, Zondi became a bodyguard, first to protect Nelson Mandela, then Thabo Mbeki, the current president.

In 2000, after Zondi won a seat on the city council, developers tried to buy the site of the Ashe Center for a shopping mall.

“I refused,” Zondi said. “I wanted to recognize the late Arthur Ashe, to honor his contributions.”

Zondi had a broader purpose than simple homage to Ashe. A revival of the tennis center, he reasoned, could revitalize the township’s battered social and athletic infrastructure.

When Ashe visited South Africa for the first time, in 1973, an event resisted for four years by the Afrikaner government, his appearance had an electrifying impact.

“His condemnations of apartheid made him one of us,” Mark Mathabane wrote of Ashe in “Kaffir Boy,” his 1986 memoir of growing up in minority-ruled South Africa.

Photo

Arthur Ashe in Soweto in 1973. His Wimbledon victory in 1975 was a catalyst for the tennis center, which was meant to inspire.Credit
Alf Kumalo

Ashe, wrote Mathabane, “did not pretend he was a white man erroneously painted black.”

For a young black tennis player like Mathabane, the way out was to go in the manner of Ashe. In 1978, when a college tennis scholarship arrived from the United States, he took it to escape poverty and repression.

To Zondi, the memory of Ashe among South Africans gave him a vehicle to develop a complex for sports, scholarship and vocational training that would be open to all in the community.

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As a start, he went to see the man whose life he once guarded. Mandela, the nation’s revered father figure, suggested a meeting with Ali Bacher, who ran the country’s world-class cricket establishment.

“He didn’t know me,” Zondi said, “but he was willing to meet and talk.” And act.

With Zondi at their side, Bacher and Smith, then the deputy director of the cricket association, approached the national lottery and the provincial government. The three men wrote letters, met with public officials and won a lottery grant of 3.5 million rand (about $475,000 today). Using Bacher’s name, Zondi also raised 4 million rand (about $543,000) from the province’s public works ministry to build two vocational training facilities and a library.

Still, even with money in hand, Zondi faced appalling conditions at the tennis center.

“The fences were gone, even the net poles were taken; it was terrible,” said Smith, who left the cricket association in March 2004 to become chief executive of the South African Tennis Association.

A month after Smith arrived, Zondi wrote a letter asking for help. Four years earlier, the association ignored a similar request.

“I telephoned him straight away,” said Smith, a former professional cricket player.

Somehow, a bond formed between Smith, who was born in Zambia and reared in the privileged precincts of the white world (his family moved to South Africa when he was 12), and Zondi, born and reared in the seedy, twilight world of Soweto.

Within months, they persuaded the black-ruled city of Johannesburg to contribute 1 million rand (about $136,000) to rebuild the tennis center.

“I sold it to the people in my district with the promise that 90 percent of the labor would come from the community” of Soweto, Zondi said.

Photo

Bongani Zondi, a political activist instrumental in reviving the center, with photos of the center in the years it was neglected.Credit
John Martin for The New York Times

Construction began two years ago. On March 31 this year, the center held an official opening. Among the guests was Ashe’s widow.

“She was crying,” Zondi said.

Accompanied by officials from the United States Embassy, Moutoussamy-Ashe brought a collection of books from Ashe’s 3,000-volume collection, pledged to send a large photo of Ashe to be mounted in the clubhouse and promised to donate some of his trophies, Zondi said.

“It was a very emotional visit for me,” said Moutoussamy-Ashe, who praised Smith and Bacher for their enthusiasm and called Zondi “incredible and inspiring.”

From the clubhouse, she saw an astonishing renaissance. The eight tennis courts had been resurfaced and restored to mint condition, with rows of new spectator benches.

A modern yellow-and-red-brick library building, for which Zondi raised an extra nine million rand (more than $1.2 million), had risen near the front security gates. Inside, the visitors saw bays for computers and compact disc players, a wall of 50 lockers beside a play/study area for younger children and space for about 120 adults to hold meetings and to read or study.

Seeing the library, Moutoussamy-Ashe said, was the “most satisfying and inspiring part of the visit.” She said she was stunned to find a library so close to “the exact same spot Arthur had built the courts 30 years before.”

She said: “I cannot think of a more fitting tribute to Arthur or to the people of Soweto. Arthur would have been so honored and extremely proud.”

For the future, Zondi and Smith are seeking money to hire a professional tennis coach and a development director, looking for sponsors to finance a major African regional tennis tournament and searching for funds to stage Davis Cup or Federation Cup competitions.

Zondi insists that with the equivalent of $100,000 in donations, the center can develop young black South Africans into world-class tennis players within six years.

For Ashe, a voracious reader and student of foreign affairs, watching young South Africans use the new library would be reward enough, and a true testament to his legacy.